While I’m not planning to let go of physical media anytime soon – not least the vinyl collection, I’m becoming a huge fan of Google Play, and its ability to play music “uploaded and matched” from my own collection. Real bonuses for me are that this happens for no extra cost to my Google Apps domain, and it seems to work well wherever I have a reliable ‘net connection. The quality when listening via headphones and Google Chrome on a laptop is surprisingly good considering they’re MP3’s – possibly transparent enough to pass a proper ABX test between them and the original uncompressed digital stream on CD.

But something is different, and something is missing… quite a lot of things are missing actually.

Where’s the song information?

Geeks might call this “metadata”. The information about the making and content of the recording is as useful to me as the actual content itself. I like knowing things like, who wrote the song I’m listening to. I might want to check the lyrics. I might also want to know whether I’m listening to a particular remaster or reissue. While the content and artwork are there on Google Play, I’ve got absolutely no idea at first glance which exact version or release of a song I’m listening to.

At present, I know who the release artist is for a song as it plays, and from which album. I can even see the album artwork for the majority of my collection, as well as a release year. What I don’t know without doing a *lot* more digging is whether the particular copy of “Bohemian Rhapsody” I’m listening to is from a 1990’s remaster, or the more recent (2011?) remasters? I’m not ordinarily such a geek – a great song is a great song whatever the media it’s carried on. But it’s good to know nonetheless. Especially if I happen to like the work of a particular mix/master engineer, or if I purchased a particular CD release of an album due to a known heritage, which has been matched to another version which sounds particularly different.

I think it would be really nice if digital streaming/shop purveyors could actually provide the full information of the songs they’re sending us. There are more involved in most major releases than just the artists, and it’s only right that they get the credit, even if the information shows no significant other commercial purpose.

What even made me think of this?

Listening to the current version of Queen’s “A Kind of Magic” up on Google Play, I’m noticing a lot more musical and tonal detail in the recordings than I remember from my own CD copies. This is an album I’ve known for the whole of my musical life, and I therefore have some very strong memories of it, and can recall absurd amounts of detail regarding both musical arrangements and sonic character and how they were reproduced differently in each of the releases I’ve owned copies of. Since I’m hearing so many new things despite listening on familiar equipment, I’d like to understand where they come from. Since I like the differences, I’d like to know if they are due to a particular engineer’s approach to remastering, and whether I can find more by the same engineer. Or whether I can learn something about the engineering approach that led to the result I liked so much.

On the one hand the freedom offered by always-on streaming access like this is wonderful – but on the other it comes with a lot of compromises, and with a lot of things “hidden” from view that I feel really should be open to us all…